The New Yorker Goings On mobile app

Anyone familiar with The New Yorker will appreciate the vast listings in the Goings On section every week. Since its inception, it has offered readers all the cultural, entertainment, and gastronomical happenings in New York for the upcoming weeks. in 2012, The New Yorker wanted to develop an app that would leverage the GOAT listings and make it available on mobile devices. The listings would be automatically updated every week, so that users had the most recent information. Spearheaded by Kelly Bare and Pam McCarthy of The New Yorker, and the Condé Nast Consumer Marketing department, I was put in charge of app design/UX. This was going to be the first app developed by Condé Nast that used an outside vendor (L&T, based in India). Mastercard became the launch sponsor of the app.

FLOW AND NAVIGATION

The first step was to get a sense of the scope. This was a bit after the iPhone 4 launched, so I was still figuring out what could and could not be done with the app given the ability of the iOS. The New Yorker had a list of features that they wished to be implemented: Video, audio, geolocation, the ability to look up events by date, by topic, and by location. functionality would also include a favorite list which would show saved events. Slowly I started to draw a flow chart based on these features.

Stage 1

Stage 2

Stage 3

DESIGN

The New Yorker has always been very texted based, very black and white. The only art the magazine uses are for the most part a single image for the story, and then drawings/cartoons interspersed in the issue. I wanted to utilize that black and white look, and bring the humorous feel of the pages to the app. Having access to their drawings, I decided to use those for the two screens that users would use to drill down into the catagories.

I also used The New Yorker typefaces, as well as a cityscape on the landing page. The cityscape provided a good seperator from top functionality icons, as well as providing a space for the date.